About Horace Mann Bond

Horace Mann Bond (1904 – 1972) was an important figure in Pan-African and African American education during the 1930s through the 1950s. He was tireless in his efforts to desegregate education in the US while simultaneously improving education to African descendants. Bond was an imposing figure from a family that produced several important scholars and human rights figures. Bond’s career exemplified the dilemma of the Black educator in the segregated South during the 1930s and 1940s: despising segregation and quietly struggling to abolish it, while still helping to improve education for persons of African descent within its confines. Bond, an intellectual with Pan-African leanings, was the only college president to participate in the All-African Peoples’ Conference in Ghana during the time of its liberation from colonialism.

Sociologist, college president, and philanthropic agent, Horace Mann Bond resolved this dilemma with intelligence and diplomacy. His work, and that of other educators like him, set into motion the historic forces that found expression in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s within the US. Horace Mann Bond served as Lincoln University’s first Black president and first alumnus president from the years 1945 through 1957.